How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
When the wind was in the north you could hear them [the Comanches], the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot-slaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sand as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives. (18)
Compare this scene, describing the vanishing ghosts of Native Americans, to the Native Americans that watch as John vanishes into the landscape at the end of the novel. Does the novel suggest that everyone simply disappears? Or is there something left behind? What might that be (besides dirty laundry and Twinkies)?
Quote #2
His grandfather was the oldest of eight boys and the only one to live past the age of twenty-five. They were drowned, shot, kicked by horses. They perished in fires. They seemed to fear only dying in bed. The last two were killed in Puerto Rico in eighteen ninety-eight and in that year he married and brought his bride home to the ranch and he must have walked out and stood looking at his holdings and reflected long upon the ways of God and the laws of primogeniture. Twelve years later when his wife was carried off in the influenza epidemic they still had no children. A year later he married his dead wife's older sister and a year after this the boy's mother was born and that was all the borning that there was. The Grady name was buried with that old man the day the norther blew the lawnchairs over the dead cemetery grass. (25)
This passage about death, violence, and family lines follows right after Quote #1 on the disappearance of the Comanches. What parallels or differences do you see?
Quote #3
The lawyer stood.
Some things in this world cant be helped, he said. And I believe this is probably one of em.
Yeah, the boy said. (228-30)
John makes a last-ditch effort with his mother's lawyer to maintain control over the ranch, and the scene closes with this statement of futility. Is this John's main reason for leaving Texas? What other motivating factors can you think of? Does he really not have a choice?